Who knew? I CAN O.D. on caffeine

I met with my marketing group yesterday after work at a coffee shop in Bellevue. Of course, first order of business when I got there was to order a coffee – I went with my usual mocha with extra shots and NO WHIP. God, I hate whip cream.

I had this friend growing up who was always shooting that stuff straight into her mouth and every time she did it I threw up a little in my mouth. Shudder.

I am extremely picky when it comes to my coffee – I attribute this to my six years of working as a barista through high school and college. First of all, if I see the espresso shots have been sitting for too long without being mixed with milk I’ll tell them to throw them out. Unless the person looks sketchy and might pee in my drink when I’m distracted by the annoying high school girls with their high pitched voices whining about that skanky hoe not inviting them to that party last Friday night, but a bad coffee drink can ruin my day – I must take steps to protect it even if that means taking a slight risk of bodily fluids making their way into my precious drink.

My other problem is people have been known to forget the all important extra shot which, believe me, is a tragedy for it makes the drink much to sweet. I am also one of those people who like extra foam on their mocha. First, it also lowers the sweetness factor and second, it keeps the mocha from exploding out of the lid, which has happened all too often to me on days when I happen to be wearing an especially cute sweater.

Anyway, I’m sure you were all dying to know exactly how I like my mocha…but what I was going to say before I got sidetracked is that I really didn’t need those extra three shots of espresso yesterday after work. Our meeting lasted a little over two hours, but since Seattle traffic is such a little bitch I still managed to get stuck in rush hour on the way home in the middle of a “November storm” (that’s what the news kept calling it, not much a storm if you ask me…but I guess the people who are preparing for floods would disagree with me).

The point is that it wasn’t really the greatest for me to be driving in that kind of traffic while having a heart attack. You read that right - I swear to you I was having a heart attack on my way home. If not a heart attack then my heart was at least skipping beats and there was chest pain involved.

My theory is that the three shots I had after already ingesting my normal amount of caffeine for the day (a morning coffee, black tea, pop) was just too much caffeine for me, which I really did not think was possible. I thought caffeine no longer had any effect on me…except for the lack of it causing a headache that feels like people having a party in my skull with jackhammers. Hopefully this lesson stays with me for a while…at least until tonight when I have to go to school and I am once again tempted to drink coffee – there is going to be a guest speaker tonight, which is never good for my attention span.